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The Seventh Annual Sermon 

ON 

Forefathers' Day. 



** See thou make all things according to the pattern that I 
showed to thee in the mount." 

Epi&tle to the Hebrews, viii. : 5. 



THE SEVENTH ANNUAL SERMON PREACHED BEFORE 
THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY IN THE CITY OF NEW 
YORK IN ALL SOULS CHURCH, FOURTH AVENUE, 
CORNER TWENTIETH STREET, ON FOREFATHERS' 
DAY, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 16th, 1906, BY THE REV- 
EREND THOMAS R. SLICER, M. A., PASTOR OF THE 
CHURCH. 



Printed by Order of the Society. 



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SERMON 



The text which gives direction to this sermon may be found in the 
Epistle to the Hebrews, viii., 5 : Moses was admonished of God 
when he was about to make the tabernacle ; "See thou make all 
things according to the pattern that I showed to thee in the mount." 



The incident is that Old Testament record, so 
familiar to each one of you, that he who would build 
the church in the desert must find its pattern in the 
heavens, that he would set up the place of worship 
for God's people must take its description and 
inspiration from the Being who is to be worshipped. 
And the thesis which naturally arises from this text 
for this occasion might be phrased as an exhorta- 
tion to us that we make our highest moment 'per- 
manent and our clearest vision constant^ and that 
to establish anything that shall abide we must 
derive its proportion from the moment when we 
were nearest heaven. The vision of your ancestors 
was a divine vision. It came into the mind of Eng- 



land that it might be realized on the shores of a new- 
world. Its first and important element, "the pat- 
tern" that appeared to the mind of the thirteenth 
century in the beginning, was the pattern which we 
may call the fiery tracery in the human mind 
of the fierce consciousness of personal liberty ; for 
the reign of the common people began when that 
first parliament was assembled in Westminster in 
1265, which had been made possible by the struggle 
of Simon de Montfort. The thirteenth century, 
not the seventeenth, is the birth time of liberty, 
and Simon de Montfort' s name history has agreed 
to place with that of Cromwell and the later heroes 
of the struggle for liberty, and from 1265 and that 
first parliament in Westminster the divine right of 
kings was not to be accepted but to be proved ; it 
was no longer possible to state it without producing 
its guarantee. And the assembly of 1265 was the 
corollory of that main proposition, which has its 
statement in the pages of Magna Carta. Observe 
what has led from that time to this to the culmina- 
tion, indeed, in the seventeenth century of these 
beginnings of New England history. There had 
been a steady shifting from the thirteenth century 
to the seventeenth of power from the weak hands 
of the Latins to the strong hands of the Saxons. 
It was not an accident, but part of the evolution 
of history that the English-speaking people, or 
their origins, should have had committed to them 



the motive power of civilization, and I think a 
modern historian does not overstate the fact when 
he says the political history of the world was in the 
issues of the seventeenth century in England, and 
that if they had missed the solution then it is diffi- 
cult to know how or where that failure should have 
been repaired. There was a further contribution 
throughout the wars of the continent and England 
in the threatened extinction of the great feudal 
nobility, and it is not an insignificant fact to observe 
that in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, 
when the first parliament of Henry VII. was con- 
vened, but twenty-nine Lay Peers could be brought 
together, " so tremendous had been the carnage and 
butchery of the heads of the feudal nobility.'' This 
had enriched the crown, but it had also strength- 
ened the people, and as the crown grew rich by the 
lands that fell in, the people grew strong by the 
energies that were cabled out. It may be noted 
also that although Wycliffe's Bible, in the first part 
of the fourteenth century, had given the English- 
speaking people a great document which may be 
called the spiritual Magna Carta of their destiny, 
it was not till 1611, in the very period that pre- 
cedes the settlement of the New England colonies 
that there came into the possession of the English- 
speaking people a copy of the scriptures in 
English that did not need to be re- translated 
into the speech of the common people ; the so- 



6 

called King James's version that was not in all 
points exact was in all points admirable. It is one 
of the mysteries of literature to know how the 
English of the Stuarts should be so strong, coming 
from so weak a source. It has been said of the 
revision of the New Testament which is now used as 
based upon the authorized version, that the transla- 
tors of King James's time did not know so much 
Greek as the revisers of our day, but that they 
knew more English ; and the criticism is well taken, 
I think. And this English Bible that lay upon the 
hearts of the Cromwell troopers became the guide, 
by its parallels of history, to the enthusiasm of the 
Puritan. It was easy for them to find parallels for 
their struggle in the struggle of Israel to establish a 
church in the wilderness ; it was easy to believe in 
the leadership of Moses, seeing they were following, 
with bleeding steps, leaders of their own. It was 
the inspiration of the Puritan theocracy. Then 
first in the history of the world since those days 
before our era in which the achievements of the 
Old Testament are recorded did men believe there 
might be a kingdom of which God would be King. 

Observe how strangely the scene of their activities 
was held vacant for them until in the evolution of 
history there should be the survival of the fittest in 
the place prepared for them. Of course it is easy 
to read the providence of God after the event, but it 
is wise to understand the providence of God from 



the event. Those roving savages of varied name 
and tribe had made the forest sound vsrith their war- 
whoops and war-dances for centuries before these 
men of England came to Plymouth. Sebastian 
Cabot had coasted along these very shores six years 
after Columbus had landed upon his island. Yer- 
razano had seen and wished to land upon the coast 
in 1524, Groswald and Pring and Weymouth had 
skirted the shores of New England in that very 
year in which the group from Scrooby had crossed 
to Holland, the French had claimed, without power 
to keep, this Acadia in 1604, and Champlain had 
surveyed these lands in 1605, and on the Kenebec 
the Popham colony had settled in 1606, when the 
grant of that whole region was made to the North 
Virginia Company of Plymouth. The Plymouth 
Company itself made a fruitless venture in 1607, 
and John Smith's map had described pictorially, if 
not accurately, the New England lands in 1614. 

But in 1620 a different story began. They no 
longer skirted the coast, but entered its harbor, 
driven, indeed, by a tempest whither they knew 
not. And how thoroughly they understood their 
business, how completely they had committed them- 
selves to the hand from heaven, may be gathered 
from the fact that on the third of November, 1620, 
King James incorporated forty of his subjects as 
" The Council established at Plymouth, in the 
County of Devon, for the planting, ruling, ordering 



8 

and governing of New England in America," giving 
to them an area to control from the 40th to the 48th 
degree of north latitude and from the Atlantic to 
the Pacitic, that this grant on paper waited but a 
month before it was made actual in the harbor of 
Plymouth. In December of that same year, the 
little group brought to the shore their vision of the 
divine government, the puritan theocracy. How 
well they set themselves to establish and make per- 
manent that " pattern they had seen in the mount " 
of their vision may be gathered from the fact that 
in fourteen years they had determined to go their 
way without reference to what should happen upon 
the English soil. They were Englishmen, loyal, 
devoted, reminiscent of the mother country, but 
when in 1624 the Council surrendered its charter to 
the King and in turn claimed for twelve associate 
members of the Council the land which now makes 
the boundaries of a nation, and acts of legal eviction 
were resorted to to dislodge the colonists, they went 
on their way, however, quite oblivious of this new 
group of twelve real estate apostles, for the pattern 
of personal liberty was already establishing itself on 
the shores of this new world, and their liberty was 
placed in the keeping of religion. They had learned 
somewhere, what we do well to remember, that 
though "man has a body man is a spirit ;" they 
had after some fashion acquired the habit of regard- 
ing themselves as of the company of immortals. 



that they were souls in process of achieving history, 
not bodies drifting to some convenient location ; 
and they placed, as we find it so difficult to do, the 
emphasis of their history in the field of religion. 
They had made the prime discovery that every man 
finds God for himself. They had no quarrel, Pil- 
grim nor Puritan, with the doctrines from which 
they had separated themselves in their struggles in 
England ; they carried the body of belief with them 
which was held by those others, who sought to 
make them conform to the usages of a church of 
which they had been a part, but they had dis- 
covered that there is no conformity to which the 
spirit is unwilling that can give shape or color or 
character to the behaviour of life. They had dis- 
covered that when a man's interests are in one place 
and his convictions in another, he suffers a strange 
dislocation in trying to bring them together ; and 
the proof of their freedom in religion is seen in the 
fact that they did not establish themselves in terms 
of doctrine but in terms of covenant of purpose ; 
and those old covenants seen upon the First Church 
in Salem, and the First Church in Plymouth, and in 
other old towns, are as free of theology as they are 
full of purpose ; they are covenants to do, and be, 
and behave, and consort together upon the terms of 
a good life. So their dissent was not the dissent of 
intellectual accuracy striving against intellectual 
accuracy, but the desire that every man might be 



10 

left to find God for himself, and we do well to hear 
the old exhortation to this, *'See thou make all 
things according to the pattern showed to thee in 
the mount." For we take our religion too easily. 
We do not make it our first business in life ; it is 
for us something added, something incidental, a 
kind of insurance against misadventure, a sort of 
first aid to the injured, an emergency provision. 
Not so with those out of whose loins you come. It 
was the business of life with them, and the gather- 
ing of sustenance, the establishment of family, the 
building of home, were but the incidents. And it 
were shameful to us if our building did not rise 
four-square with their thought, with the thought 
that we belong first, last, and always to the spiritual 
world. Bradford expressed this in terms repeated 
at Plymouth, stating that they were "The Lord's 
free people," and "joined themselves (by a Coven- 
ant of the Lord) into a church estate, in the fellow- 
ship of the gospel, to walk in all His ways, made 
known unto them, or to be made known to them, 
(according to their best endeavors,) whatsoever it 
should cost them, the Lord assisting them." There 
is some parenthetic phrasing, as though they would 
provide for emergencies, but the main purpose 
marches on free of dogmatic statement and defini- 
tion, free of all but the main intention to a good 
life. And so it was that having reached the state 
in which they were heart-whole, having been able 



11 

to focus their attention upon the real interests of 
life, they understood that, being the children of the 
living God, they were upon His errands in the 
world ; for this reason, though they believed in the 
" total depravity " of the race, they still provided 
for universal education. That is one of the beauti- 
ful inconsistencies that charm us in the reading of 
their rugged history, that though the race, in their 
belief, was corrupt to the core it was capable of 
development to the last degree, and not thirty years 
had passed before provision had begun to be made 
for the education of all the people. Surely the 
courage that had been required to believe in the fall 
of man was a courage that left something yet to 
believe in the rise of man. Their care for education 
was fundamental, a part of their liberty, a part of their 
religious inspiration. They had said in 1607-1608 
they would *' go into the Low Countries where they 
heard there was liberty for religion for all men ; " 
and when in 1620 they transferred their activities to 
the rugged coast that waited for them their view of 
liberty was unchanged, was to be brought into the 
achievement of that structure of which they had seen 
" the pattern " in their highest moments. It is said 
by their critics that they were narrow and vindic- 
tive and that they disregarded the consciences of 
other men. What is to be said for their own con- 
science ? The conscience of the man who owns it is 
the first consideration, and in that little group 



12 

where but ^Ye beside Brewster and Standisli were 
left in the second year to bury the dead and tend 
the sick, in that little group of seven, with their 
invalids and starving people on their hands, there 
was already the fixed belief that the first business of 
a people is the conserving of its own autonomy. I 
have small patience with those philanthropists who 
love every country better than their own, whose 
" eyes are in the ends of the earth," and who are so 
far-sighted that they can see nothing that is at their 
feet. These colonists were narrow ; they only had 
twenty-six acres in the second year ; it did not 
require much vision to scan it all. It was not far 
afield they had to look for the glinting of the red- 
skins between the trees, or to the edge of the strand 
where they had uncovered ''God's treasures in the 
sand," nor was it far to realize their own purpose, 
for they were heart-whole ; they were not as the 
modern man, who does not know his opinions till 
he has taken account of stock. They knew what 
they knew ; and they were learned men, many of 
them ; those signatures on the deck of the May- 
flower are not written with a steady hand, and are 
not all quite legible, but they are the signatures of 
the whole company down to those that were ser- 
vants for the group, the signatures of the men who 
had conquered first in the name of conviction in 
England, had cultivated their principles in Holland, 
and then had mastered the perilous voyage and 



13 

were proceeding to claim a new world unabashed 
and unafraid ; their crystal hearts clear in purpose 
and undimmed in thinking became the jewel point 
on which was to turn the revolution of a new era in 
history. They persecuted the Quakers ? They drove 
Roger Williams into Rhode Island? Why not? 
They had one business in hand and that was to 
weed out of their own group everything inimical to 
its constituted integrity ; the land was wide, let the 
Society of Friends hold hands somewhere else, let 
Roger Williams found in Rhode Island a new settle- 
ment — and you mark that although he was received 
with cheerfulness by his Indian host he was not 
, long there until he went from Providence to New- 
port to hold a controversy with an opposing Theo- 
logian. I have an idea that it is quite possible the 
Puritans, certainly the Pilgrims, regarded all con- 
troversy as an intrusion upon their purpose, that 
they knew exactly beyond any peradventure what 
they had started to do, and that they were enacting 
in microcosm the great business of a people in 
the macrocosm of this great eighty millions of to-day 
to create and enclose and fend off, and in absolute 
integrity to preserve the institutions they had 
started to establish. Then there is another thing to 
be remembered. Intense moral activity is always 
narrow ; it is the penalty of ethical passion that it 
shall burn its way through all opposition. It is the 
stroke of the narrow blade that gives it the pene- 



14 

trating power, and I doubt if anything was ever 
achieved that was associated in the beginning with 
any aspect of las ser fair e They corresponded with 
that simple and perhaps rather undignified verse 
which we sometimes quote : 

" A glorious thing is prudence, and tliey are useful friends, 
Who never make beginnings until they see the ends : 
But give us now and then a man, that we may make him king. 
Just to scorn the consequence and just to do the thing." 

And these people, whose forefathers you honor in 
your presence here, and in your thoughts to-night, 
had a business in hand that required haste and in- 
tensity and moral passion, and their mistakes were 
easier to forgive than the virtues of some other men. 
^* Their desires," says Bradford, "were set on the 
will of Grod, and to enjoy His ordinances, and they 
rested in Providence and knew whom they had 
believed." Our slacker time is even unable to quote 
their texts correctly; "I know in whom I have 
believed" is constantly said; not so did they read 
it ; they said "We know whom we have believed," 
and there is a celestial diameter between believing 
God and believing in Grod. Not only so. They had 
the prophetic instinct, an instinct that was culti- 
vated and disciplined by the very ruggedness of 
their situation. I suppose that the cold of New 
England has had something to do with making New 
England reticence proverbial. It it not a tropical 



15 

climate, and fruits come up between the stones in 
the soil. It was a good answer the Maine man made 
to one who, coming from a Virginia or Maryland 
estate, and looking over this rugged land with the 
rocks cropping out of the soil, rocks with no show- 
ing in them of metal-bearing quality, said, "What 
do you raise here?" It was a good answer the 
rugged wson of Maine made when he replied, "For 
one thing, we raise men." And the answer was 
quite sufficient, for it has the vindication of 
history. And if the training and discipline of 
savage and climate and unsympathetic soil did 
create a certain reserve of temper, a certain re- 
ticence of expression, a certain unresponsiveness to 
approach, it never dulled the edge of their initi- 
ative, nor turned back the spring of their purpose. 
And I ask you to remember, as sons of New Eng- 
land, when the reproach is made that you are not 
as my own Southern people are, spontaneous, re- 
sponsive, easily kindled — I ask you to remember 
that an anthracite temperament, if difficult to 
kindle, makes a hot lire that lasts a long while. 
And remember also, in the review of your history, 
how, although the first vote that was ever cast in 
this country by an assembly against slavery was 
cast in 1688 by a little group of Quakers in German - 
town, by which they sought to revenge themselves 
on the past and prove their love of liberty at the 
same time, it was not long before New England 



16 

learned the trick of it, and the fire of enthusiasm 
for liberty as for almost every other reform in this 
country, was kindled under the New England 
snows. Snow, when it lies upon the surface keeps 
warm the soil, feeds the roots of the coming harvest 
as it melts ; and every enthusiasm that has burned 
well and long has had at least part of its fuel dug 
from under the New England snows. 

Now, may I speak a word of exhortation, since we 
celebrate our traditions ? Traditions are a back- 
ground to throw the figure of the present into the 
foreground. And that is an unfortunate artist who 
paints his background so well that his figures melt 
into it. Fra Angelico painted his angels against a 
background of gold, but his angels were exceeding 
human ; and there is a way of dealing with our tra- 
ditions that coins them into the currency of the 
time, and there is a way which rehearses tliem until 
they become a creed as meaningless as any other, 
and he who knows his history at the expense of his 
activity has mistaken the virtues of his fathers for 
the performances of himself. Were they in earnest 
about the civic duties that awaited them ? Before 
1640 twenty thousand people had come into this 
laud ; they had a problem forced upon them by the 
frivolities to the north of them ; Merrymount was 
not far to seek, and it was a different conception of 
liberty which Gorges and Brewster held. They 
were keen and hard, relentless and effective, and 



17 

their conception of their civic duty had no fluent 
lines but was angular and inflexible. Can we better 
that ? Can we hold the great inheritance so lightly- 
that because we are many we can abate the enthu- 
siasm that moved them when they were few? Is it 
possible that being now eighty millions of a kalei- 
descopic variety, so that in a single city of four 
millions it is like juxtaposition of contiguous tribes, 
is it possible that, being so many and various, we 
may better our inheritance of great purpose and 
claim each of us so small a pittance that it leaves us 
beggared of civic virtue 1 I know no word so sacred 
as the word "Society." The church gains its sanc- 
tity by being a segment cut out of society for a 
specific purpose. Society has been well defined as 
"an organism in which every cell has conscious- 
ness ;" and the corollary of that proposition is in- 
evitable ; that the health of the tissue depends upon 
the health of the individual cell ; and the civic prob- 
lems of our time are met with a larger resource than 
our forefathers knew. Are they met with equal 
integrity and sacramental seriousness ? The exhor- 
tation comes home to us to know whether we are 
the graves of God's mercies or whether we are to 
coin the principles of the past into the performances 
of to-day. The town meeting was as sacred in their 
thought as the church, and it was not a meaningless 
compliment when Emerson said of the elder Judge 
Hoar that " when he left the bench and sat down in 



18 

the town meeting honor came and sat down with 
him." And the New England towns which planted 
schools alongside of the churches and libraries 
alongside of the schools planted men over each who 
should be the best possible guarantee of their 
efficiency. I like to think of the time when no man 
could vote unless he was a communicant of the 
church. Such a condition would be impossible, 
even undesirable, now, but maybe it meant then 
that a man was dedicated to the common good. 
And I like to think of the time when they had to 
relax that bond and adopt their half-way covenant, 
or of the time when each man paid a percentage of 
his income for the maintenance of the church. It 
gave warrant to that witticism of Edward Everett 
Hale, when he said, replying to something Dr. 
Brooks said of Trinity Church : " Well, Dr. Brooks, 
you have built a nice chapel, don't call it a 
church; the congregational churches are the na- 
tional church of America." Until the middle of the 
last century their maintenance was the warrant 
that they were part of the thought and interest of 
the community. These are pages of history turned. 
Can we better them 1 Can we place above the old 
obligation of a man to take the Lord's Supper 
before he takes his vote in hand a higher obligation, 
an obligation to feel that the vote itself is a sacra- 
ment ? Against the relaxing of the bond, and saying 
that at least half the house must be represented in the 



19 

service of religion, can we not set a higher require- 
ment ? Can we not go further and say that marriage 
itself is a sacrament which binds to higher sanctities 
than the church can prescribe ? When we speak of 
the ancient time when men's property was levied 
upon for support of the ministry of religion, can we 
not, now that that is passed and would be regarded 
as a tyranny, put a better thing in its place, and 
claim for the service of religion our entire selves ? 
" See that thou make all things according to the 
pattern tliat I showed thee in the mount" is the 
command that the God whom he served sounded in 
the ears of the leader of God's people ; and I would 
end as I begun, by the exhortation that we shall 
make our highest moments permanent, and our 
clearest vision constant, and that he who would 
build anything upon the earth shall find its inspira- 
tion in the moment when he was nearest heaven. 



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